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Sunday, 30 September 2012

This is an interesting book which I enjoyed a great deal, although with a
few reservations. I loved the setting - Anuna's people live in a
village built under an overhanging rock shelter, in the style of many
such found in the southwestern US and Mexico. This is an unusual and
evocative setting, very nicely drawn. The author has also created a
beautifully detailed world view, a religion combined with a magic
system, which makes perfect sense. The early part of the book, which
describes how Anuna becomes a 'Weaver' (spiritual leader and healer) to
her people is lovely, and the little traditional stories scattered
throughout the book are charming.

The characters are more of a
mixed bag. Anuna herself is a very sympathetic character, whose
anxieties are perfectly in keeping with her age and experience. She
knows herself to be capable, but she is easily cast into despair and
needs constant reassurance. However, her growth in confidence during the
story and the way she takes up the role of leader while retaining her
humility is very believable. Baran, too, comes across as a fully rounded
person, and Dog, of course, is a wonderful character.

The villain
is a little too black to be truly believable. The author makes a good
effort to give him redeeming qualities and the sort of history which
explains his behaviour, even if it doesn’t excuse it, but still I found
him just too evil to be realistic, and his men seemed too ready to
follow him unquestioningly. And then there are the kidnapped women from
Anuna’s village. Oh dear, what a bunch of useless victims. Even given
their beliefs and the horror of the situation, I would have expected a
touch more resilience and common sense. Given that a large part of the
plot revolves around them, it’s a pity they’re not a bit more robust.

The
plot is a fairly simple one: while Anuna is off in seclusion becoming a
Weaver, her village is raided and almost everyone killed, apart from
four women taken off to become breeding stock for the raiders. There are
no swords, no battles, no kings or empires, no duelling wizards, no
quest to save the world. The only fights are the scuffling in the dirt
variety, with the occasional dagger, spear or kick to the groin. This is
a very basic story of survival in very trying circumstances, the battle
of good and evil writ very small and personal. I had some issues with
the women’s belief that suicide is the only honourable solution to the
defilement of rape, but the author addresses the idea head on, so it
doesn’t go unchallenged. For those sensitive to the subject, rape is a
central theme but there is nothing graphic or erotic in the depiction of
it, although I confess to some unease at the heroine’s sexual response
in a context of captivity, brutality and rape.

The author’s
writing style is rather nice, detailed and descriptive without being
overwrought. However, there’s a great deal of angsting amongst the
women, a lot of crying and even falling into swoons, which I don’t have
much patience with, I’m afraid. There’s also a lack of polish - numerous
minor typos (not spelling or grammatical errors, so much as mistypes -
‘it’ for ‘in’ and the like - plus words missed out and odd extra words,
as if an edit failed to remove all the unwanted words). A character
called Korak later becomes Karak. And a logic fail - a major plot point
is that two of the village women reject Anuna because she is now
‘tainted’, except that one of the women, Orana, is herself ‘tainted’ in
exactly the same way. Hypocrisy by the women, or an error?

There
are also outbreaks of total stupidity on the part of some of the
characters. Who, given the choice of being burned alive or trying to
escape, would actually say - no thanks, we’ll burn? And who, having
reached safety, would actually turn round and go back for them? In
fantasy, all sorts of improbable things can happen, but (magic aside)
human nature remains the same, and some actions just aren’t credible.

Despite
these quibbles, I enjoyed the story and tore through it a couple of
days. There is a strong romance element, and for those who like
large-scale action and epic dilemmas, this is not the book for you, but I
rather liked it, especially the unusual setting and the
well-thought-out magic/religious system. And Dog, who has a starring
role. The negatives keep it to three stars.

Friday, 28 September 2012

I’ve read some of the author’s Regency romances, but this is a very
different animal, a cosy murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie,
the first in a long series featuring grumpy middle-aged Agatha Raisin, a
London PR executive taking early retirement in the picturesque
Cotswolds and finding it deadly dull, until a murder crops up. This is
very much a formula book, where the key is not so much the crime itself,
but the nature of the detective (or amateur sleuth, in this case) and
colourful setting. This one does well on both counts. Agatha herself may
not be the most accomplished social animal (translation: she falls out
with pretty much everyone), but she’s still someone we can sympathise
with and root for when her quiche poisons the local bigwig. And having
lived in a small village myself, the descriptions of rural life and
attitudes struck a chord with me. The first half of the book I found
very readable, as Agatha tries, and mostly fails, to fit in with village
traditions, and the author describes these twee Cotswold villages very
well. Non-Brits might find it hard to believe just how stuffy these
small English villages can be, but I found Agatha’s experience totally
plausible.

Many of the characters were no more than caricatures,
and the irritating Ray was quite implausible, but there were one or two
with some depth - Agatha herself, and the vicar’s wife, Mrs Bloxby, in
particular. I liked the young policeman, Bill Wong, as well. As for the
murder - the most likely suspect and motive were obvious, so it became a
question of working out how it was done, and frankly, anyone could have
come up with half a dozen different ways of achieving it. Not the most
challenging exercise for the little grey cells, but neither the police
nor Agatha could manage it, it seems. And then at the end the book
descended into farce. Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable light read.
Three stars.

Wednesday, 26 September 2012

I knew something of what I was getting into when I chose to read this
book. Within the first couple of chapters, there are zombies, ogres,
goblins and dragons. And panzers. That’s panzers as in German WWII
tanks. Heading each chapter is a snippet of seemingly modern-day
technology-heavy action. This is a doozie of a tale. It’s as if the
author wrote a checklist of all the fantasy elements he liked and threw
everything into the mix. Wizards? Check. Golems? Check. Magic swords?
Check. Cannons, rifles, pistols... Yep, let’s have all those too.
Crusaders, troglodytes, gargoyles, unicorns, giants, werebeasts,
elemental spirits, ogres? Why not?

Well, why not is an
interesting question. This is certainly a book where anything can
happen, and most likely will. There are long - very long - battle
sequences where one evil thing after another appears, and just as our
heroes appear to have triumphed, something even more horrible appears,
yet the eponymous Flank Hawk, a farmboy having no special skills,
improbably survives everything. For anyone who likes high-octane action,
this is definitely the book for you. But it does mean that a lot of
other things get lost by the wayside. There’s no subtlety or depth to
the characters, for instance, they are mostly just a succession of
names, most of whom will become (literally) cannon fodder before too
long. There’s little time for introspection or thoughtful addressing of
deeper themes. There’s not much background or world-building or detailed
history, although what there is is nicely done. There’s no sense of
unique time or place. And there’s no sign of complex motivation. There
are just a lot of unspeakably evil things trying to wipe out everyone
else and take over the world because - well, just because, I guess.

But
interspersed with all the zombified mayhem, there are, eventually,
moments of greater interest, to me at least. In fact, almost everything
beyond the battlefield is intriguing. The encounter with the seer in the
King's City is fascinating. The dragons are cool (but then, dragons are
always cool). I liked the whole hierarchy of wizards, and the
differences between them: “... the elemental magic of wizards left no
trace, while that of an enchanter could linger for hours.” I have a
suspicion that the principles were inspired by either online or tabletop
gaming, but still, it felt nicely complex. And towards the middle of
the book, when Flank Hawk sets out on his Impossible Quest (tm) and
forms an unlikely alliance with two passing characters, the story opens
up nicely to become something much more interesting.

The writing
style is unsophisticated, and there are clunky moments (“Ha ha,” he
laughed...) and times when things were clumsily phrased and could have
been clearer. The Crusader's pseudo-medieval language grated on me a
lot, and there are a few mistakes in it. I would have liked some more
information about the wizardly hierarchy - Grand Wizards and Lesser
Enchanters and Imperial Seers are a bit hard to sort out without some
kind of guide. And a map would have been very useful. Throwaway
references to Milan and the Alps are mixed in with talk of the Faxtinian
Coalition and the Vinchie Empire and the Reunited Kingdom.

It's hard to imagine any of the bigger traditional publishing houses picking up a book like this. Only a small independent would take a chance on this sort of off-the-wall book. To
say it's original doesn't even come close. I would love to be a fly on
the wall if the author ever has to pitch this to one of the big six publishing executives. "Well, it's got every fantasy idea
you can think of in it.[*] And Nazi technology. And a nuclear holocaust.
And an Ebola outbreak. And Crusaders..." Frankly, I love the ideas more
than the execution, as the writing perhaps isn't quite up to the
ambition of the plot, but it rattles along at a frenetic pace, and in
between the overlong battles, there's a nice little story with an
interesting backdrop. There were moments when I laughed out loud at the
sheer craziness of it - for instance when the trio face down a giant,
armed variously with rocks, a spear, a rifle with bayonet, a prayer and
an evil magic sword. This is just not your average fantasy book.

Ultimately,
it really didn’t work for me. There were too many zombies for my taste,
too many mindless and weird creatures altogether, and I would have
liked more depth to the characters and less fighting. The interesting
combination of the mercenary, the werebeast and the Crusader was one
which, had the story slowed down enough to let the characters blossom a
little more, could have been very powerful. Although I like a story to
surprise me, this is one where there appear to be no constraints at all
on what might turn up next. It reminded me a little of my only encounter
with the imagination of China Miéville (an encounter I lost, I might
add; I just don’t have the right receptors in my brain for that kind of
weird). So for me it was no more than two stars. But for those made of
sterner stuff, or who like rip-roaring action from start to finish, this
is an interesting book with a nicely worked out ending and some clever
ideas. There are some really neat details tucked in there which show a
great deal of careful thought. I commend the author for his fertile
imagination.

[*] There were no fairies, pixies or prophecies. I
didn't notice any vampires, either. But pretty much everything else.
Even the farmboy turned hero.

[Edit: the author has posted a link to this review on his own blog, which has attracted an interesting comment on my 'gender bias'. You can read it here.]

Friday, 21 September 2012

Maureen Lee has written a great many nostalgic family saga type books
about her native Liverpool, but this is a different kind of story, set
in Cornwall, written some years ago and now self published. Or rather,
it was - it seems to have disappeared from Amazon, and the author's
website has no information about other plans, so I'm not sure whether
it's about to be republished or whether she simply withdrew it from
sale.

This book has ‘THRILLER’ on the cover in capital letters,
but it wasn't, in the end, a particularly thrilling experience. The
story of three sixteen-year-old girls, not children and not yet women,
and what happened during their last summer of innocence and the secret
they kept for many years afterwards, is not an original idea, and for
most of the book the story crawls along predictably and uninterestingly.
The author has made some attempt to give the three distinctive
personalities, and to some extent this works but there wasn't quite as
much depth as I would have liked to any of them. It's difficult,
admittedly, to describe severe depression convincingly. Daisy should
have been a sympathetic character, but somehow we never quite get under
her skin, although, to be fair, this is partly because we only ever see
her through Norah’s eyes.

Fortunately, there are some twists at
the end which raise the book above the merely pedestrian. It isn't a bad
book, actually, it's a workmanlike and readable affair, with characters
which are moderately realistic, a plot that rises above the hackneyed
and a comfortable writing style. There are numerous minor typos, words
missing and the like, but nothing drastic. It's disappointing, however,
that it never quite manages the depth that would have made it memorable.
The way in which the three women are affected by their experience and
how it influences their lives is a theme that the author touches on, but
never manages to imbue with the emotional resonance it deserves. Nor is
there much sense of time or place, just a few topical issues tossed for
dramatic effect. So I never much cared about the characters and it
wasn’t particularly thrilling, but nevertheless I kept turning the
pages, and it was an easy enough read. Three stars.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

The beauty of fantasy is that you just never know what you’re going to
get. Even when it sounds like a conventional plot theme, an accomplished
author can put a new spin on it and produce something special. I was
nervous about this one - a war between Angels and Demons, waged with the
help of humans? It sounded trite - but as I read on, it turned into an
absorbing study of magic, and an unexpectedly thought-provoking analysis
of war.

The central character is Darius, a wizard who has built
an elite troop of soldiers around him, a sort of special-ops with magic.
There are numerous other characters in his world - his fellow wizards
in the city of Bastion, some of his soldiers, and, on the opposing side,
the warlord and his sorcerors. And a few angels and demons put in an
appearance, too. Although Darius is the main point of view character,
several other characters have point of view chapters too, partly to fill
in details of events in other places and partly to fill in background.
Of course, this also serves to give them more depth. I’m very much a fan
of this way of writing which is nicely fluid and works well to keep the
action moving. Having a single POV protagonist is very restrictive, and
having equal rights always feels artificial to me.

The
world-building is rather well done. The field of conflict between the
two warring sides seems rather small and empty - a city or two, some
fortresses and not much else. But it becomes clear that there’s a reason
for this, and there are other settlements and cultures existing around
the fringes and beyond the immediate range, and in the past there were
more. The history of this war, in fact, is very much a central part of
the story and the author draws out the strands of the past very
elegantly. And then there’s the magic. The real meat of the story, for
me, is the growing realisation (on both sides) that magic is not just a
static ability, it can grow and be developed in all sorts of new and
ingenious ways. The way that Balkan, for instance, researches and then
experiments with new forms of magic, and even a sort of magical
technology, is fascinating to watch. Even wizards, it seems, must adapt
and change with the times.

Ultimately Darius is forced to face
up to the consequences of the current war and its escalation, and decide
whether having the angels on your side is sufficient reward for the
constant battles and deaths caused by the demon-supported enemy. This is
a fascinating train of thought - is it really such a great idea to have
angels bringing you healing and other gifts, or are you better off on
your own? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this argument before, or
at least not so explicitly. And so, eventually, the story reaches its
own answer to the question, or at least sets events in train for it to
be discovered (in a future book, presumably). The final conflict is
huge, an earth-shattering experience which changes everything. It should
be an emotional overload, but somehow it just - isn’t. If I have one
complaint about the book, it’s that somehow there isn’t enough emotional
engagement with the characters and their respective fates. Even when
named characters died, I didn’t feel it. The author sets everything in
place and pushes all the right buttons, but for me it simply didn’t
work. I don’t know why that should be, it’s a complete mystery to me,
and I can only assume it’s just a matter of mood.

I had some
minor quibbles along the way. I felt there were too many important new
characters introduced late in the day. Sometimes the attempts to
humanise characters were a little clunky (the family lives of Balkan and
Pendrick in particular). I would also have liked to have Traigan, the
enemy warlord, make an appearance at the end, since he had been such an
important part of the plot, and I wondered what happened to the thralls
at the end. I’m not mad keen on angels and demons in fantasy, since
inherently good or evil characters are a bit dull, but in this case the
author showed a much more complicated and interesting side of the
angels, at least (the demons were - well, just demons, on the whole).
But on the plus side, the characters all behaved sensibly and
intelligently, and I very much liked the way that Arric (the council
leader) and Darius overcame their initial hostility and reached a
working accommodation. In fact, the whole story simply oozes
intelligence, and easily overcame the modest amount of clunkiness here
and there in the writing, or the very small number of typos. An
enjoyable and thought-provoking story, notable for the well-developed
world-building and constantly evolving magic system. And a map - always
extra brownie points for a map. Four stars.

Tuesday, 18 September 2012

This seems like a fairly standard sci-fi affair, but there’s a nice
mystery at the bottom of it, and there are some amusing elements tossed
into the mix. Thought you couldn’t find vampires and werewolves in
sci-fi? Think again. And it starts well, oh so well. But then... oh
dear. What a disappointment.

The characters are basic
cookie-cutter types. There’s the maverick captain with the tragic past
and an addiction problem, brilliant (of course), young, a risk-taker but
gets results. There’s the seasoned senior officer with the impeccable
career who suddenly and inexplicably goes rogue. There’s the beautiful
female second-in-command, who plays things strictly by the book. And so
on. It’s not that these are uninteresting, but there isn’t anything very
original about them either. Nevertheless, there’s a good rapport
between the various crew members, and a real feeling that they work well
together as a team. I enjoyed the early parts of the book very much -
the confidence and joking between the characters, the mysterious goings
on the team are investigating, the easy writing style without too much
techno-babble - all of this was very appealing.

There are some
oddities that jumped out at me. The hero goes into a crowded bar to meet
his friends but has trouble finding them. Erm, isn’t that a problem
that was solved by mobile phones? So why have spaceships in the future
lost the ability to track down individuals? The hero keeps his stash of
illegal drugs in a safe, opened purely by thumbprint. Well duh, there’s a
reason safes usually have a combination lock. And how many times must
this supposedly brilliant person forget to hide his pills away before he
gets the message?

And then there came a point about two thirds
of the way through where the hero does something so incredibly stupid
that I nearly tossed the book away. Now, I have no problem with
protagonists who take risks in order to further the plot. Sometimes an
author just has to have his characters do something radical to move
things along. But it has to be plausible. Here, the options are: 1) we
fail and we’re all screwed, totally; or 2) we succeed, and - well,
actually we’re probably all screwed just the same. In other words, the
likelihood of any realistic success is virtually zero. And from there
it’s all downhill, so that the options become: 1), 2), 3)... we’re all
screwed and this time we die, horribly, painfully. And the only way out
is the miraculous rescue out of nowhere (also known as deus ex machina).
No prizes for guessing what happens...

Now, maybe some readers
are less critical than me, and in between all the frankly stupid
decision-making is some quite dramatic action stuff - hand-to-hand
fighting through the corridors of space-ships, that sort of thing. And
for those who enjoy that, it may well compensate for the idiocy that
made it necessary. It’s unfortunate that the author’s grasp on sentence
structure breaks down at this point, and he develops a nasty habit of
breaking off entire clauses. Which is very irritating. And makes my
inner pedant scream. Which is quite unpleasant. Argh! Now, I understand
the effect he’s trying to achieve - in a particularly tense moment,
short choppy sentences work very well to increase the drama, but please,
please, please - let them be sentences, and not horrible bits and
pieces.

And then, right at the end, there’s a massive info-dump
revealing the mystery that set things off and what’s going on behind the
scenes, with the proviso that none of this may be true, it may just be a
clever ploy to suck the hero into the conspiracy of the title. Plus it
sets everything up for the next book in the series. It may not be a
surprise that I won’t be one of those breathlessly waiting for it to
download. Sorry, but this was too silly for words. I’m happy to accept
that the hero of a book is a brilliant risk-taker, but only if his
actions are in fact brilliant. The first two thirds of this book was
heading for four stars, but then it cratered, leaving it at two stars,
at best.

Wednesday, 12 September 2012

This is the second book in the alternate history series about Temeraire,
the dragon captured as an egg from the French and inadvertently hatched
at sea and induced into captivity by the ship's captain, Will Laurence.
Where the first book focused on Temeraire's growth and training as a
part of the Aerial Corps, engaged in fighting the French during the
Napoleonic wars, this book is about his personal history. For it turns
out that Temeraire is a rare Chinese Celestial dragon, the egg was sent
as a gift to Napoleon, and the Chinese are not happy about him being
deployed in the war, ridden by a mere naval officer, and want him back.
Relations with the Chinese are delicate, so Temeraire and Laurence are
packed off to Peking to negotiate some kind of deal.

This book
has the same characteristics as the first, being more about the
formality of language and manners than action. There are some quite
dramatic encounters, but these episodes are brief. The highlight for me
is, as before, Temeraire himself, who is by far the most interesting
character in the book. He has a refreshingly straightforward attitude to
life, and time after time Laurence is forced to attempt to justify his
own society's customs and morals against Temeraire's much more liberal
ideas. These discussions are fascinating - Laurence is a product of his
own era of history, and there are many ideas which he accepts without
thinking, and others where he has absorbed his family's somewhat
different ideas (he is against slavery, for instance, even though it is
still legal in Britain). For instance, it is fascinating to juxtapose
Temeraire's instinctive feeling that it is wrong to flog or hang a man,
with the obvious need to maintain discipline aboard ship. The Chinese
have very different ways of treating dragons, too, and Laurence is
forced to acknowledge, against his natural feeling, that they do some
things better than the west.

I have no idea how accurate the
depiction of Chinese life of the era is, or whether the author has taken
liberties, but it all seemed very plausible to me. There were some
fascinating details, for instance the ceremony on board ship when
crossing the equator, which the author mentions in passing without going
into much detail. Both the Chinese delegation and Temeraire himself are
mystified by the whole thing, but the author resists the temptation to
info-dump all her research on the subject, writing as if we were of the
period and would naturally know all about it. I rather like this
minimalist approach, which suits the book very well, giving it almost an
authentic air of having been written in 1806.

This is actually a
thought-provoking book in many ways, addressing a number of ideas head
on, such as slavery versus voluntary service, and others less directly,
such as the absolute will of an emperor versus the democratic monarchy
system prevailing in Britain. It’s not a high-action book, although
there are episodes of drama, but in some cases they feel rather bolted
on as an afterthought to ramp up the tension. However, the tension
between the British and the Chinese is nicely done, and the slow but
definite way in which the barriers begin to dissolve and the two sides
inch their way towards an understanding is beautifully described. In the
end, everything hinges on trust, or the lack of it, and the resolution
is both frighteningly dramatic and ultimately very satisfying. Once
again, I enjoyed this book unreservedly, and although it wouldn’t suit
everyone, for me it’s another five star affair. I’m almost nervous to
read any further in the series in case this high standard comes crashing
down. Can any author sustain the ideas and this level of writing for
nine books? It’s hard to imagine.

This is a book that sets out right from the start to amuse and
entertain, with no pretensions beyond that, and there's absolutely
nothing wrong with that. I've never been to Florida, so I've no idea
whether the small town lifestyle portrayed here is accurate, exaggerated
or a parody, but it made me laugh and it gets extra brownie points for
that. The author has a sharp and acidic way of describing characters so
that they appear fully formed and in garish shades of dayglo orange or
baby pink in the reader's mind. There's absolutely nothing subtle about
it, and it's a style you either love or hate.

The plot - well,
the plot is neither here nor there, but essentially, a body has turned
up in the car of the eponymous Mama, and her three daughters attempt to
clear her name. That's about it, really. The story is told from the
point of view of the middle daughter, Mace. There's some romantic
interest between Mace and the cute detective assigned to the case, and
also between Mace and the cute ex-boyfriend. There are numerous possible
murderers, all with plausible motives, and the whole thing builds
nicely to the inevitable dramatic climax.

This will never win
any literary prizes, but it's nicely done, the Florida setting is evoked
well enough that you can feel the sweat trickling down your back, and
the mystery is guessable without being overwhelmingly obvious, which is
all one can expect. It wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, and I found a
few irritations - the author is inclined to explain even irrelevant
details, such as why the heroine's watch is still working after she fell
in the swamp (it was waterproof - well, duh!), and the characters are
more like caricatures. But there's a Southern charm to it all, and I
enjoyed it. Three stars.

[Also known as 'His Majesty's Dragon'.] This has a very simple premise:
imagine the Napoleonic wars, but with dragons. It sounds mad, but
actually it works astonishingly well. The author manages to capture the
ethos of the times perfectly - the class system, the rigid formality of
manners, the somewhat florid language - while still creating a
fascinating work of fantasy.

The starting point is the
acquisition of a dragon egg from a captured French frigate, which
inconveniently decides to hatch while the British ship is still
returning to port. Not wanting to allow such a prize to go to waste, the
crew, or rather the officers (that's the class system at work again),
decide to see if the dragon will accept a harness. As it happens, it is
the Captain, Will Laurence, who manages it and has to leave the Navy and
join the dragon corps as a result. His regrets about this, which he
regards as being cast out from good society, and how he comes to terms
with his situation, form a good part of the book. It is interesting that
he is now regarded as a pariah both by his own sector of society,
including his family, and also by the Aerial Corps personnel, who see
him as coming from outside their close-knit and unorthodox culture,
completely untrained, and resent him walking off with a prize dragon
when they have (in their own eyes) far more suitable and highly trained
people.

There is a certain amount of action, since the dragons
are all trained for aerial combat as part of the war effort against the
French, but the focus is very much on the characters - both the humans
who live with the dragons, and of course the dragons themselves, who are
very much characters in their own right. Laurence's dragon, the
Temeraire of the title, is in fact by far the most interesting character
here, being highly intelligent and curious and somewhat radical in his
politics, which puts Laurence rather on the defensive, forced to justify
the customs he himself takes for granted. Laurence spends quite a lot
of his free time reading to Temeraire, including scientific works which
Laurence himself doesn't pretend to understand, but the dragon does. It
must be a bit like having a very precocious child, I suppose. The
relationship is a close one, and there are some wonderful moments
between man and dragon. To be honest, Laurence himself struck me as a
difficult person to like in many ways, since he has very rigid ideas of
propriety - a very prickly man - but his affection for Temeraire is
charming.

The dragons are quite carefully thought out. There are
various wild species which have been bred and cross-bred for aerial
combat purposes for centuries, and different nationalities have bred
their own varieties with different characteristics. Only some can
breathe fire, for instance, and none of the British ones can, but they
have a variety which can spit acid, for instance. Unlike the Pern
variety, these dragons aren't telepathic and they talk quite normally,
but there is a very strong bond between dragon and handler, even if the
handler mistreats his dragon (I found poor Levitas very distressing to
read about). Nice, too, that there are female dragon handlers, although
true to the times, this is by the choice of the dragons, not a blow for
feminism. Laurence was quite shocked by the idea (but then Laurence is
easily shocked, it has to be said). I also liked the idea that, since
dragon handlers have much shorter lifespans than dragons, handlers try
to arrange for a son (or daughter) to take over when they die, and there
is a certain amount of pragmatic breeding of humans for the purpose -
the author has obviously put a lot of thought into details like this.

The
plot develops quite nicely, although it really isn't particularly
important. The objective is to describe the society of two hundred years
ago as it would have been if there were dragons in the world then, and
this the author does brilliantly. One could argue that access to dragons
over many previous centuries would have changed history far more than
is evident here - would there even be a Napoleon and a Nelson, for
instance? But that hardly matters.

The writing style is
perfectly in keeping with the period, and so is the behaviour of the
characters. It might seem a bit slow, and not everyone would enjoy the
formal language used, but I loved it. I liked the whole idea of the
Aerial Corps, with its slightly informal air, and the way the larger
dragons go into battle loaded with gunners and bombers and whole teams
of crew, rather like a ship of the air. This makes the battles quite
unusual, with attempts to board enemy dragons and hand to hand combat
(with swords and pistols!) while strapped on to a dragon conducting his
or her own form of combat. This is one of those rare books where I
actually didn't want it to end. Luckily there are nine books in the
series to date, so those who want can indulge their enjoyment of
Temeraire for quite some time. Five stars.

Sunday, 2 September 2012

This is a nice gentle little story, easy to read and much shorter than
the average work of fantasy. It has the usual type of magic which can do
almost anything, it has elves, goblins and dragons, and a little bit of
history, with a war in the past, now ended. This is very much a
traditional fantasy, where most people are good-hearted, the villains
are evil, and the heroes are required to overcome all adversity so that
good will prevail. Not too much gritty realism here, although the
goblins do get up to some pretty despicable things.

So, the plot.
Fifteen-year-old Elody has just become a dragonmage, by bonding with a
newly-hatched dragon, which will power her magic. Her seventeen-year-old
brother Rinn failed to bond with a dragon, but has his own innate form
of magic. And there are goblins on the rampage, provoked by an elf
wizard for his own reasons, who is also killing off dragons. And that’s
about it as far as the plot goes. The world-building is fairly sketchy,
since we only see one small village and its surroundings, and it’s all
rather twee, but the magic system is nice, and very well described.

I’m
not sure whether this is meant to be YA or not. The main protagonists
are fifteen and seventeen, but in fantasy that doesn’t necessarily mean
anything since over the length of a trilogy or more a fifteen-year-old
can become seriously mature. However, there is a simplicity to both the
story and the writing style which suggest a younger audience.
Personally, I prefer something with a little more complexity to it,
whether of plot or characterisation, but such things are a matter of
taste, and later books may well develop that complexity, as is common in
multi-volume works.

My biggest complaint concerns
the two main protagonists. As teenagers, a certain amount of petulance
and wilfulness is normal, but these two really are downright stupid
sometimes. Time after time they get into trouble because they simply
won't take advice, or do the obvious sensible thing. Elody does a lot of
crying and Rinn rushes around with over-optimistic levels of bravado,
they have to be rescued frequently, and both of them whine a lot. It
makes them seem a lot younger than their stated ages, and in the type of
simple agricultural community where they live, I really think they
would both have grown up a lot more than seems apparent here. But when
they do display a modicum of common sense and formulate a plan with the
help of useful adults, the results are quite effective. I think the
author was aiming for a pair of charmingly immature kids who are then
forced to grow up rather quickly, but for me the charm got rather lost.

This
is not a complicated book, but then it's also quite short. It's
straightforward traditional fantasy with some nice dramatic moments and a
good climactic encounter, reasonably well written, with few typos, and
for those who like this kind of thing, it works fine as a pleasant
undemanding story. I found it a little too simplistic for my personal
taste, however, and the two protagonists too tiresome by half, which
keeps it to two stars for me, but there's nothing wrong with it. In
fact, I suspect that later books in the series, if Rinn, Elody and her
dragon grow up a bit, might be very much more interesting.